Instead of talking about birth certificates, Trump said President Obama should be focused on gas prices, which according to Trump, is really easy to solve if Obama just “gets off his basketball court.” That’s rich.
*****
But there’s a deeper meaning to Trump’s basketball dig. Trump was once again reminding Americans that Barack Obama is, dare I say it, black. And not one of “the blacks” with whom Trump apparently gets along so well. Obama, in Trump’s eyes, is not one of the exceptional blacks like Kwame Jackson, the Harvard MBA who finished in second place in the first season of Trump’s NBC show The Apprentice.

Instead, Trump suggests that Obama is one of those stereotypical basketball-playing black men who are, presumably, too lazy or too dumb to get a real job, or to inherit their father’s $40 million business, as Trump did.

How DARE Trump point out that Barack likes basketball. I mean, he does, right? And he was filmed playing it on Monday – I believe he was showing off his mad skillz for the kids. But, look AWAY. It’s racist to bring it up.

Next up- Arianna on Obama’s reelection strategy:

So, the Beltway thinking goes, count on those in your base to come out (where else are they going to go?), and run a middle-of-the-road campaign to win over those independents before your opponent can.

It’s the classic way to run a campaign. And it was proven completely wrong in 2008 by the winning coalition that swept Obama to victory. He didn’t win by swerving to the middle. His 2008 campaign had a different premise: that elections don’t have to be the cynical zero-sum game Washington believes them to be. Instead of fighting for the ever-dwindling number of swing voters, Obama fought to win over the much larger number of voters who had turned their backs on the process.

Obama won 2008 because the media turned their backs on their job. Obama was a unknown. He was Teh One. He ran on hope and change and unicorn dreams. No one knew or cared what he was going to do in office, just that he was going to be somehow different and better than what we had before. It was all very nebulous.

And a significant portion of the voters who gave Obama his victory were African-Americans, Latinos, and the poor. The percentage of African-Americans casting their first vote went from 17 percent in 2004 to 19 percent in 2008. That means 800,000 African-Americans voted for the first time. Among Latinos, the percentage went from 22 percent in 2004 to 28 percent, adding another 800,000 first-timers. And among those with a family income of less than $15,000, first-time voters went from 18 percent to a whopping 34 percent.

No racism there. There is nothing racist about voting for a guy simply because he’s a similar color as yourself. Nope.

These are precisely the people who have been disproportionately hurt by the recession. Unemployment among African-Americans is much higher than the national average. Indeed, even as the country’s rate ticked down in March to 8.8 percent, it climbed from 15.3 to 15.5 percent among African-Americans. Among Latinos, the unemployment rate is 11.1 percent. And, of course, the ongoing shredding of the social safety net greatly impacts all those low-income voters.

Ironic, no? Those that voted for him in monolithic numbers are those the worst affected my his disasterous leadership.

However, unlike the Democratic Party base, first-time voters, especially young people, minorities, and low-income families do have something else to do on Election Day — stay home.

So what is Obama doing to reach these increasingly unlikely voters? One thing they’re not particularly interested in is reducing the deficit at the expense of growing the economy and creating jobs. As the Project Vote study notes: “individuals who voted for the first time in 2008 strongly favor an active role for government in ensuring economic fairness and educational opportunity.”

Oh fuck. Now I’m getting depressed. They don’t care about reducing the deficit, bla bla bla, they just wanted some of that fairness shit.

For instance, 79 percent of those 2008 first-timers think the economy should be boosted by increasing spending on public works and infrastructure. And 86 percent support more spending on public education.

And 100% of the people who think this way are stupid and uninformed.

But instead of audaciously enlarging the debate and taking his case directly to the American people — who, in poll after poll, say they would prefer the government to focus on jobs instead of deficit reduction — Obama has dutifully accepted the narrow range allowed to him by the conventional wisdom. That’s hardly the kind of leadership that inspired those 10 million people to vote for the first time in their lives.

Obama should be listening to these no-nothings. It’s his way to reelection!

WINNING.

As John Judis writes in his perceptive analysis of where the White House’s economic message has gone terribly wrong, “Obama has, sadly, bought the Republican argument for why the economy is in trouble.” And the effect, Judis says, “is to nullify Democrats’ ability to offer popular programs that will fuel growth, save jobs, and reduce people’s insecurity.”

The economy isn’t in trouble! Pish posh. We need to keep up, and increase, those wealth transfer programs and social spending.

This is where the media attention should actually be focused. Obama’s chances of re-election depend much less on the Republican circus that’s currently in town and much more on how much he buys into the conventional wisdom of what the country needs and wants. For every independent or unlikely voter who is actually obsessed with the deficit, there are millions of potential voters waiting to reward with their vote a president who is willing to take bold and decisive action to create jobs and grow the economy. Or punish him by staying home on Election Day 2012.

I thought he was creating jobs with his spendulous? Look, Arianna, Obama doesn’t have the slightest clue how to create jobs. He’s barely ever held a job himself.

You know who knows how to create jobs? The American people. Not the government, not Washington. People. Those little people. I’m sure you’ve seen them occasionally when you leave your gated mansion.

Palate Cleanser. At least in the sense that it offers RATIONAL thinking. Obama’s only hope of reelection? He must acquiesce.

He may bitterly hate the fact, but he is trapped, as he has often been trapped while President, between his own heart-felt convictions and reality. The economy is sluggish and slowing. As even The New York Times has been forced to acknowledge, Ben Bernanke’s strategy of quantitative easing has failed to generate growth and reduce unemployment. It seems to be producing inflation, instead. We are also on the verge of a fiscal crisis. PIMCO has dumped its treasury bonds, and the Chinese hint that they may throw up their hands and stop purchasing them. S&P has raised questions about the reliability of the federal government’s credit. The dollar is plunging in value, and the price of oil and other commodities is going through the roof. Can you imagine what the misery index is going to look like on the first Tuesday in November, 2012?
*****
Obama’s greatest problem is that he has lost the debate. Politely, calmly, steadily, patiently, and over a considerable period of time, Paul Ryan has in his gentle way explained to our fellow citizens that we cannot continue to live beyond our means – not, at least, on the scale that President Obama has in mind. In the meantime, the housing market has not cleared; unemployment has not fallen appreciably; no one wants a tax increase; and Congressman Ryan’s stock has gone steadily up.